Goals were set.  Plans were made.  Things can change.  Coming off of a 37-35 loss at Indiana State last weekend, Coach Eric Wolford and his staff have fallen back into a fundamentals approach.  YSU tackled poorly, especially in the first half, in their loss to the Sycamores.  The good news is that it is only one loss and that there is time to regroup.

“It is only one loss and there is a lot of season left”, commented Wolford.  “We have to get back to some fundamental things.  We felt like Indiana State did a couple things fundamentally better than us at a couple of key positions and it showed up.  Unfortunately, four or five plays can define a game, and we found that out the hard way.  So we are spending time this week on blocking, tackling, and technique to get better, and I feel that we have gotten better as a result.”

The Penguins have been immersed by the circus that came to town this week, aka, the San Francisco 49ers. The Niners are using the YSU facilities in between their games against Cincinnati and Philadelphia to avoid the two long plane trips.  However, Youngstown State was turned into Fort Knox for a few days as campus employees were not even allowed to get too close or see too much.

Wolford peeked ahead to South Dakota State.  “They are going to come out and, obviously, try to run the football against us.  Quite frankly, since they joined the conference we are 0-3 against them.  Last year we closed the gap and only lost by ten, but the year before that, they blew us out.  We have to come out and play some football and can’t afford to get off to a slow start again.”

Andre Stubbs, it was discovered, is out for the year for the Penguins.  He will be given a medical redshirt and start as a freshman again next year.

Jelani Berassa talked about the football camp environment.  “Coach said we have got to get better with our fundamentals.  We are probably going to get together to watch the South Dakota game and continue to work on correcting all of the mistakes we made last week against Indiana State.  We want to be able to look back on that game [Indiana State] as a turning point where we got better because we learned from our mistakes.  We are still very confident.”

“After the game last week, we knew we had to get back to fundamentals”, said Obinna Ekweremuba. “We knew what we had to do in that first half last week and we were not able to execute the game plan.  We believe in our coaches, and we have to do a better job.  You can’t let a running back go 69 yards to start a game, it doesn’t work real well in the end.  Coach Kravitz made some adjustments at halftime and we want that positive momentum to last awhile.”

The Penguins host South Dakota State next weekend.  This is one of the toughest opponents that the Penguins have on the docket from year-to-year and a good week of practice leading up to the contest is imperative for the Penguins to have a shot at winning.